My Story

I have been interested in Militaria my whole adult life. While in High School, I started making military miniatures (known as lead soldiers at the time, and they really were made of lead (which probably explains a lot about me) and soon moved into sculpting and casting my own figures. But there was one very important a priori requirement to making your own figures. You had to know the exact details of the uniform you were creating. It did not do just to know the color of the coat and lapels. You had to know the cut of the coat, how many buttons there were, what the various insignia looked like and what they meant, what style of boot was worn, and so forth. So I began to study military uniforms and military history – you had to know which regiments fought in which battles if you wanted to make a diorama of the battle of Waterloo – in addition to creating the miniatures.

This was what got me started collecting military uniform prints. While there are many excellent books on the subject, many of which are almost required reading and study, nothing brings a particular uniform to life better than a well drawn print. And, not only are the prints valuable source material for making miniatures, they are also a great avocation in and of themselves. And being somewhat of an artist myself, I was quickly drawn to those prints that had, to my mind at least, the most artistic merit, were the most informative about the uniforms depicted, and that held the most historical interest.

That brought me to collecting prints by Richard Knötel, Lucien Rousselot, Adolf Menzel, Eugène Leliepvre, Charles Vernier, Rudolf von Ottenfeld, Richard Simkin, and numerous others. They all fulfilled all three of the criteria I had set for what constitutes a worth-while set of uniform prints. They are all outstanding artists, they are all students of military uniform history and have an intense interest in historical accuracy, and many of the prints they created are collectors items and can be quite rare.

As I said, I started collecting while in High School. I started collecting the L’Armée Française series of plates by Lucien Rousselot when he was still drawing and publishing them! But then life got in the way. Marriage, children, career, and maintaining a home forced me to put my interests in militaria aside. But, now that I am retired, I once again have the time to follow my interests. The old soldiers have been brought out of storage, dusted off, repaired, and put on display. New ones are on the way. And… I have resumed collecting uniform prints. Most often, you acquire new prints singly or in small groups, but it is generally more economical to buy large lots of prints if you are lucky enough to find them for sale. But buying prints in bulk inevitably means that you wind up with duplicates of some of the prints you had previously purchased singly.

Thus this web site. I am offering for sale those prints that I have duplicates, and in some cases triplicates, at what I hope are very reasonable prices. I am not doing this to make a profit, but rather to defray some of the expense of buying new material, and I hope to allow other collectors to add to their own collections.

So, happy collecting, and I hope that you find that one print that you have been searching for!